- Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik
Freie Universität Berlin
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- Beatrice Gruendler (PhD Harvard University 1995, honorary doctorate Leiden University 2023) has been Professor of Ara... moreBeatrice Gruendler (PhD Harvard University 1995, honorary doctorate Leiden University 2023) has been Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2014, and previously taught at Yale University (1996–2014) and Dartmouth College (1995-96). In 2017 she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG). She has published on classical Arabic poetry and its social context, the integration of modern literary theory into the study of Near Eastern literatures, early Islamic book-culture (ninth century AD) and Arabic palaeography. Her major publications include: The Development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century (1993)edit
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This essay introduces the second special issue of JAS that grew out of our workshop on Animals, Adab, and Fictivity at the Freie Universität Berlin. Beatrice Gruendler and I explore the historian al-Masʿūdī's curse against anyone... more
This essay introduces the second special issue of JAS that grew out of our workshop on Animals, Adab, and Fictivity at the Freie Universität Berlin. Beatrice Gruendler and I explore the historian al-Masʿūdī's curse against anyone who would alter his work and compare the reception of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's Kalīla wa-Dimna, which reflects a much more flexible approach to textual stability. We also introduce the articles within this special issue.
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Poets in this arabphone multiethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials, and the urban upper classes, its tone ranging from celebration to reprimand and even to threat
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The article is devoted to a lengthy incipit, here in the meaning of a copyist’s addition preceding the main text, which constitutes the longest and most substantial later addition to Kalīla wa-Dimna. The incipit, it is argued, makes... more
The article is devoted to a lengthy incipit, here in the meaning of a copyist’s addition preceding the main text, which constitutes the longest and most substantial later addition to Kalīla wa-Dimna. The incipit, it is argued, makes Kalīla wa-Dimna usable as an anthology of ethical and practical advice geared to a wide audience. The incipit evinces a scholastic structure, whose parts are analyzed and placed in relation to similar elements within the book’s other prefaces and the introductions and conclusions of chapters, supported with charts and a synoptic edition of representative witnesses out of the twenty-seven manuscripts containing it. These can be identified as a structural group, cutting across other text-based groupings of the textual tradition of Kalīla wa-Dimna so far identified. The shared occurrence of the incipit in manuscripts whose main texts belong to different groups, or are idiosyncratic, suggests that copyists were combining multiple sources to produce their versions. This hypothesis is supported by the high degree of cross-copying in the main texts of the manuscripts bearing the incipit relative to other manuscripts.
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Poets in this arabphone multiethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials, and the urban upper classes, its tone ranging from celebration to reprimand and even to threat
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Machine generated contents note: Part One - Broad Theoretical Directions and Their Applications -- Claudia Ott (Erlangen) -- Miindlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (orality and literacy) -- am Beispiel arabischer Epik-- Roxane Haag-Higuchi... more
Machine generated contents note: Part One - Broad Theoretical Directions and Their Applications -- Claudia Ott (Erlangen) -- Miindlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit (orality and literacy) -- am Beispiel arabischer Epik-- Roxane Haag-Higuchi (Bamberg) -- Vom H6ren zum Lesen, von der Szene zum Kapitel: -- Aspekte von Miindlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit in einem -- friihen persischen Roman (Mortaiz MoSfeq Kzemi: Tehrdn-e mahuf)-- Birgit Embalo (Beirut) -- Intertextuelle Beziige zeitgen6ssischer arabischer Poesie -- zur arabischen Dichtungstradition-- Andreas Pflitsch (Beirut) -- Konstruierte Wirklichkeiten: -- Die zeitgen6ssische arabische Literatur, -- der Radikale Konstruktivismus und die Erzahlungen aus 1001 Nacht-- Arnim Heinemann (Halle/G6ttingen) -- Sea-Horses on the Banks of the Ganges: -- Lyric-Omniscient Authority and Metaphorical Interaction -- in M odem Arabic Poetic Texts-- Hilary Kilpatrick (Lausanne) -- Eastern Mediterranean Literatures: -- Perspectives for Comparative Study
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CHAPTER FOUR MEETING THE PATRON: AN AKHBÀR TYPE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR MUÓDATH POETRY Beatrice Gruendler The effects of poetic speech can hardly find a more ample illustra-tion than that furnished by akhbàr about early'Abbàsid... more
CHAPTER FOUR MEETING THE PATRON: AN AKHBÀR TYPE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR MUÓDATH POETRY Beatrice Gruendler The effects of poetic speech can hardly find a more ample illustra-tion than that furnished by akhbàr about early'Abbàsid poets. This justifies ...
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Research Interests: Art and Multidisciplinary
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The volume brings together approaches to different elements of Arabic-Islamic civilization, mainly in the areas of linguistics, literature, literary theory, and prosody, but also including religion, ritual, economics, and zoology.... more
The volume brings together approaches to different elements of Arabic-Islamic civilization, mainly in the areas of linguistics, literature, literary theory, and prosody, but also including religion, ritual, economics, and zoology. Contributions also touch upon the adjacent areas of the Old Iranian, Persian, Greek and Byzantine written traditions. Some take as their points of departure specific Arabic words (cat, giraffe) or morphemes; others explore literary genres, subgenres (oration, ode, macaronic poem, travel narrative) or figures within them (the trickster, the devil). Cultural concepts such as wishing, gift-giving or discourse are treated, as are aspects of broader phenomena, such as the role of gender in dream interpretation or the relative merits of luxury goods and mass-produced commodities.
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The book gives an insight into panegyrics (madîh), a genre central to understanding medieval Near Eastern society. Poets in this arabophone multi-ethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials and... more
The book gives an insight into panegyrics (madîh), a genre central to understanding medieval Near Eastern society. Poets in this arabophone multi-ethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials and the urban upper classes, its tone ranging from celebration to reprimand and even to threat. This panegyric genre is represented by Ibn al-Rûmî, who dedicated many of his poems to the last Tâhirid governor of Baghdad. Ibn al-Rûmî’s work is ideally suited to this study, as it addresses the issue of literary patronage and provides a self-portrait of the artist and his social position.
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... GRUENDLER Beatrice ; Résumé / Abstract. The essay explores the range and function of the emulation (mu'arada) in al-Andalus, taking as examples two odes of Ibn Darraj al-Qastalli (d. 421/1030), dedicated to his first patron... more
... GRUENDLER Beatrice ; Résumé / Abstract. The essay explores the range and function of the emulation (mu'arada) in al-Andalus, taking as examples two odes of Ibn Darraj al-Qastalli (d. 421/1030), dedicated to his first patron al-Hajib al-Mansur and his last patron al-Mundhir b ...
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In The Life and Times of Abū Tammām, translated into English for the first time, the courtier and scholar Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Ṣūlī (d. 335 or 336 H/946 or 947 AD) mounts a robust defense of “modern” poetry and of Abū Tammām’s... more
In The Life and Times of Abū Tammām, translated into English for the first time, the courtier and scholar Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Ṣūlī (d. 335 or 336 H/946 or 947 AD) mounts a robust defense of “modern” poetry and of Abū Tammām’s significance as a poet against his detractors, while painting a lively picture of literary life in Baghdad and Samarra. Born into an illustrious family of Turkish origin, al-Ṣūlī was a courtier, companion, and tutor to the Abbasid caliphs. He wrote extensively on caliphal history and poetry and, as a scholar of “modern” poets, made a lasting contribution to Arabic literary history. Like the poet it promotes, al-Ṣūlī’s text is groundbreaking; it represents a major step in the development of Arabic poetics, and inaugurates a long line of treatises on innovation in poetry.
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The volume brings together approaches to different elements of Arabic-Islamic civilization, mainly in the areas of linguistics, literature, literary theory, and prosody, but also including religion, ritual, economics, and zoology.... more
The volume brings together approaches to different elements of Arabic-Islamic civilization, mainly in the areas of linguistics, literature, literary theory, and prosody, but also including religion, ritual, economics, and zoology. Contributions also touch upon the adjacent fields of the Old Iranian, Persian, Greek and Byzantine written traditions. Some take as their points of departure specific Arabic words (cat, giraffe) or morphemes; others explore literary genres (oration, ode, macaronic poem, travel narrative) or figures within them (the trickster, the devil). Cultural concepts such as wishing, gift-giving or discourse are treated, as are aspects of broader phenomena, such as the role of gender in dream interpretation or the relative merits of luxury goods and mass-produced commodities.
The book gives an insight into panegyrics (madîh), a genre central to understanding medieval Near Eastern society. Poets in this arabophone multi-ethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials and... more
The book gives an insight into panegyrics (madîh), a genre central to understanding medieval Near Eastern society. Poets in this arabophone multi-ethnic society would address the majority of their verse to rulers, generals, officials and the urban upper classes, its tone ranging from celebration to reprimand and even to threat. This panegyric genre is represented by Ibn al-Rûmî, who dedicated many of his poems to the last Tâhirid governor of Baghdad. Ibn al-Rûmî’s work is ideally suited to this study, as it addresses the issue of literary patronage and provides a self-portrait of the artist and his social position.
Nine essays explore how Arabic and Persian literature from the ninth to the seventeenth century often served dual functions: it conveyed didactic, ethical and ideological concerns to rulers, and it secured the subsistence, status and... more
Nine essays explore how Arabic and Persian literature from the ninth to the seventeenth century often served dual functions: it conveyed didactic, ethical and ideological concerns to rulers, and it secured the subsistence, status and protection of authors. To conterbalance his addressee’s greater power, the writer invested himself with the authority of religious law and ethical ideals, imparted criticism, and touted the value of his own art. In their adaptations of lament, panegyric, quatrain, love lyric, epistle, statutes of government, dynastic history, mirror of princes and shadow play, authors further pursued a place in the literary tradition, while rulers sought the public display of their culture and largesse and lasting memory.
This book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Near Eastern literatures and participates in the ongoing dialogue with literary theory. It presents nineteen different readings of Arabic, Persian and Turkish works from the classical... more
This book offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Near Eastern literatures and participates in the ongoing dialogue with literary theory. It presents nineteen different readings of Arabic, Persian and Turkish works from the classical and modern periods, throwing new light on the texts as well as discussing chosen theoretical models, their applicability and interconnection.
This book provides an overview of the genesis of the Arabic alphabet and serves as a reference tool for dating early Arabic manuscripts. It presents the gradual shift of the alphabet from the early Nabatean stage (second century B.C.E.),... more
This book provides an overview of the genesis of the Arabic alphabet and serves as a reference tool for dating early Arabic manuscripts. It presents the gradual shift of the alphabet from the early Nabatean stage (second century B.C.E.), its appropriation for the Arabic language, and its early Islamic development until 100 A.H./720 C.E. It includes chronological charts with analyses of the form, alignment, connection, and diacritical marking of each graph and a discussion of the emergence of the early Arabic scripts.
A collaboration of Cluster of Excellence 2020 «Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective»-Research Area 3, «Future Perfect» and the ERC funded project Kalīla and Dimna-AnonymClassic. This series of events invites... more
A collaboration of Cluster of Excellence 2020 «Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective»-Research Area 3, «Future Perfect» and the ERC funded project Kalīla and Dimna-AnonymClassic. This series of events invites discussions on how to theoretically engage with the concept of narrative framing in premodern Arabic literature and adjacent literary traditions. Our aim is to develop a comprehensive definition of «framing narratives» beyond a merely descriptive perspective and to interrogate its function within textual production. The events will be held in English. The workshop will be held online.
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Gorgias Press is delighted to announce the launch of its new inter-disciplinary book series Islamic History and Thought. The series will provide a platform for scholarly research on any geographic area within the expansive Islamic world,... more
Gorgias Press is delighted to announce the launch of its new inter-disciplinary book series Islamic History and Thought. The series will provide a platform for scholarly research on any geographic area within the expansive Islamic world, stretching from the Mediterranean to China, and dated to any period from the eve of Islam until the early modern era.